DELTONA, FL (WKMG/CNN) - A squirrel got into a retirement home, injuring at least three people and prompting a call to 911 on Thursday. "It's jumping on people and biting them and scratching them," the 911 caller said. "It's still in there, and people are bleeding." People can be heard in the background asking each other if they are all right. The attack happened around 2 p.m., the woman telling dispatch people are bleeding and need help. "I don' t know if we need an ambulance, but we need some care for people here," the 911 caller said. "The people...

A principal of an Oklahoma City elementary school had to make one of the weirdest phone calls to a parent, when a little boy was found keeping a dead squirrel in his backpack. The little boy’s reasoning was priceless. A photo of the late rodent was posted on Ladye Hobson’s Facebook and explained the awkward phone call she received from the principal of Gatewood Elementary in Oklahoma City. Ladye Hobson told Fox 25 that her husband often jokes about making squirrel dumplings, and the little boy, Brylan, thought he would bring home dinner for the family. It’s probably safe to...

Some rodents are more than scurrying little mammals. Some rodents are auteurs. This brazen little squirrel director steals a GoPro camera and makes a video shot entirely from its point of view, giving us a private tour of the trees from up above. After snatching the camera off the ground, it takes off running and scales the tree, showing us a day in the life of the intrepid little explorer. Thankfully, the squirrel also had excellent manners, and made sure to drop the camera back down where the owner could easily grab it and share this visionary masterpiece.

Blast off! Watch as this squirrel leaps from tree and escapes from being this hawk’s lunch. Many scenarios in life require the fight or flight instinct. It is pretty clear which one this squirrel chose in his near death experience. This brown squirrel went from being dead meat to a flying squirrel in a matter of seconds. Like something out of a movie, it looks as if the squirrel hit Inspector Gadget’s ejector button as he launches from the greenery and into the blue sky. The squirrel lives to see another day and is telling all his squirrel buddies what...

NORTH MYRTLE BEACH, SC (WMBF) – The Nuisance Wildlife Agency continued to search for a possible rabid squirrel that attacked some residents Tuesday afternoon in North Myrtle Beach. According to incident reports from the North Myrtle Beach Department of Public Safety, law enforcement responded to a home on Causey Drive, where a woman said a squirrel attacked her while she was walking to her car. Responding officers indicated the woman showed them scratch marks on her right arm and upper back, the report stated. A little more than an hour later, officers were sent to a Watson Drive address. There,...

DEAR JOAN: For the very first time in 24 years at our home, we have a black squirrel in the backyard. With about a dozen trees in back, we have had many gray squirrels over the years but never a black one. How rare are they? He looks smaller, maybe younger than the others. Is this a mutant squirrel or a different type? Dana Arbaugh, Milpitas DEAR DANA: Black squirrels are unusual but not rare. Palo Alto appears to have the most black squirrels in the Bay Area, but they are also seen elsewhere. Technically, you could call it a...

A vicious squirrel is on the prowl in Novato. What's been reported as a gray fox squirrel has jumped from trees and scampered into classrooms and garages to attack a total of eight people in northwest Novato in past weeks, and the Marin Humane Society is on the hunt to find the perpetrator before more attacks ensue.

<p>Yesterday the branch secretary of the club said the rodent had caused around £300 worth of damage.</p>
<p>He added: "When I opened the door it was absolutely ransacked.</p>
<p>"There were bottles scattered around, money scattered around and he had obviously run across the bar's pumps and managed to turn on the Caffrey's tap .</p>

Muskogee County gun range posts sign saying establishment is 'Muslim free' The Save Yourself Survival and Tactical Gear store in Oktaha, off U.S. 69 in Muskogee County, has posted a sign indicating the business is a Muslim free establishment. Posted: Thursday, August 13, 2015 1:45 pm | Updated: 2:49 pm, Thu Aug 13, 2015. By SAMANTHA VICENT World Staff Writer An owner of a Muskogee County gun range confirmed Thursday that his business has a sign posted on its window indicating the facility is a "Muslim free" establishment, an act that has drawn criticism and raised legal questions from a...

A squirrel in the UK broke into a Worcestershire pub, July 12, 2015, and caused over $400 worth of damage. 62-year-old Sam Boulter, the owner of the Honeybourne Railyway Club, told the Western Daily Press that he originally thought his private members club might have been ransacked by burglars, when he discovered the damage.

GUADALUPE MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK, Texas, -- The U.S. Department of Interior shared a photo of a squirrel at a Texas park displaying a little-known behavior for its species -- eating a snake. The photo, which the department shared on Facebook and Twitter, was snapped by park ranger William Leggett at Guadalupe Mountains National Park. "Ranger Leggett heard a racket outside the Frijole Ranch and then recorded the entire epic battle. The squirrel devoured most of the snake, bones and all, down to the last two inches," the Facebook post said. The post said it isn't unheard of for rock squirrels...

Squirrel breeding is a real job—and apparently a very dangerous one if you're dealing with the wrong kind of squirrel. After the mysterious deaths of three German men who all worked as breeders of variegated squirrels—a kind of squirrel native to Central America that's sometimes kept as an exotic pet—researchers have identified a new virus that had apparently jumped from the squirrels to the men, LiveScience reports. The men, who were in their 60s and regularly socialized together, died between 2011 and 2013 from inflammation of the brain, and researchers say at least two of them had been scratched or...

After Phillies starting pitcher Phillippe Aumont gave up four earned runs in the second inning of Friday night's game against the Cardinals, a nearby squirrel decided enough was enough. Climbing up the protective netting behind home plate, the squirrel gave Phillies faithful some much-needed entertainment while watching their 23-45 ballclub on its way to another dreadful loss. The critter showed off some impressive balance as he circus-walked across the wire holding up the net. With the crowd's attention, the squirrel then nosedived almost 30 feet onto the top of the Phillies' dugout and hopped in to join the team. Actually,...

Officials said a squirrel caused a massive outage that left more than 40,000 East Bay Pacific Gas & Electric customers in the dark Monday night. The utility told KPIX 5 that a squirrel got into the El Cerrito substation and damaged equipment around 8:00 p.m. Monday night, leading to an outage that impacted 45,000 customers at its peak. The squirrel did not survive. The squirrel-related outage impacted customers in Berkeley, Albany, Richmond and El Cerrito. Officials said most of the power was restored after 10:00 p.m. On social media, people posted pictures of being stuck in the dark. BEST tweeted...

In an act of nature that defied the laws of probability, a squirrel seriously injured a bicyclist at the Levi’s GranFondo charity ride in Sonoma County over the weekend when it ran onto the course and got caught in the spokes of the man’s bike, authorities said.

We usually think of distractions or interruptions as coming form the world around us. But is that really the most common source? Consider the following parable drawn from the stories of the early Desert Fathers and from monastic experience: Sometimes there would be a rush of noisy visitors and the silence of the monastery would be shattered.This would upset the disciples; not the Master, who seemed just as content with the noise as with the silence.To his protesting disciples he said one day, “Silence is not the absence of sound, but the absence of self.” The fact is, our greatest...

It wasn't the happy ending that many were originally reporting. The squirrel found his way into the great nuthouse in the sky. "By now, most people have seen the video of the cat/squirrel which ran in front of Kevin Harvick Sunday night at Atlanta Motor Speedway. He thought it was a cat at first but on closer inspection, it was obviously a squirrel. The squirrel ran across the track in Turn 3 but soon afterward, he made his way around to Turn 4 where he ultimately met his demise. That's right, there is no happy ending for this story. The...

<p>In televised comments this morning, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that responsibility for the tragic downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 on Thursday lay with “the government of the territory on which it happened.” He stopped short of directly blaming the Ukrainian military for launching the missile – but Russia’s many state-controlled media outlets have been only too happy to do that for him. On Friday morning, as the world tried to make sense of the crash in separatist-controlled Ukraine, the Russian spin machine was already doing damage control. Gruesome images of the wreckage were splashed across this morning’s papers under headlines blaming Kiev for the attack.</p>

U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power told an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Friday that the United States cannot rule out that Russia helped in the launch of the surface-to-air missile that shot down a Malaysia Airlines jet over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board. Power said the U.S. believes the plane was likely downed by an SA-11 missile fired from an area in eastern Ukraine controlled by pro-Russian separatists. She said Russia has provided SA-11s and other heavy weapons to the separatists. Britain's U.N. Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant, who called the emergency meeting, was more emphatic...

Few scientists have ever seen the rare tufted ground squirrel (Rheithrosciurus macrotis), which hides in the hilly forests of Borneo, but it is an odd beast. It’s twice the size of most tree squirrels, and it reputedly has a taste for blood. Now, motion-controlled cameras have revealed another curious fact. The 35-centimeter-long rodent has the bushiest tail of any mammal compared with its body size. "The species is really quite bizarre," says Erik Meijaard, a conservation scientist with People and Nature Consulting International in Jakarta. Meijaard and his wife, Rona Dennis, an independent remote sensing scientist, gathered a collection of...

Fox News has reported that a giant squirrel has been stalking former first lady Hillary Clinton during her national book tour, where she has been touting Hard Choices and, some say, initiating her campaign to run for President in 2016. The feisty creature, unlike other squirrels, is wearing a T-shirt saying, “Another Clinton in the White House is Nuts.”

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) Todd: White House was 'caught off guard' MSNBC’S Chuck Todd observed Tuesday that the White House was “caught off guard” by the disastrous public roll out of their prisoner exchange for Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl. Todd and Andrea Mitchell agreed that the White House had likely thought there would be “some euphoria around this, the only POW that was remaining in Afghanistan, that there would be a rally around the flag. That didn’t happen.” “They were expecting criticisms of Gitmo, criticisms of the detainees that were chosen,” Todd said. “They did not expect this criticism of the attempt to...

HOLLAND TOWNSHIP, MI -- A woman who signed an apartment lease with her boyfriend and allegedly agreed to be liable for any smoke or water damage, faces a $2 million lawsuit after he attempted to cook a squirrel and started a massive fire with a torch. ... Khek Chanthalavong told investigators the blaze started after he had been using a torch on the deck of a unit he shared with Barbara Pellow, to burn the fur off a squirrel he'd captured. Once the fur was removed, he placed the torch in the corner of their deck, next to a plastic...

A squirrel caused a power outage that left nearly 1,200 PG&E customers in San Jose without power Wednesday morning, a utility spokeswoman said. The outage was first reported around 8:20 a.m. and affected 1,180 customers in the city's College Park neighborhood, according to PG&E spokeswoman Monica Tell. She said a squirrel came into contact with some PG&E equipment in the area, causing the outage. One of the customers affected was Caltrain's San Jose dispatching center, according to Tell. The outage caused the dispatching center to fail and led trains to stop, causing major system-wide delays. The area impacted was bounded...

We may worry about hackers taking down the electrical grid, says Eugene K. Chow at The Week, just like we worry about, for example, bikers hitting frail old ladies crossing the street. But both threats are overblown. Like biker-on-old-lady violence, cyberattacks are so rare that they’re notable — we fear them and talk about them precisely because they don’t happen very often. But the true threat lies elsewhere, with more common villains. On the street, of course, it’s cars. In the nation’s electricity infrastructure, it’s squirrels. Chow explains: Even squirrels are proving to be, well, a squirrelly problem. No one...

"This is a wild video. This squirrel apparently used to live with the cat as another pet in this woman’s home. The squirrel finally went out on its own, but still comes back from time to time to play with the cat."

NORTH CHARLESTON, SC - A North Charleston woman is in jail after police say she stabbed her husband with a ceramic squirrel. According to the police report, Helen Ann Williams attacked her husband on Christmas Day after he failed to bring beer back to the house. Police said they were dispatched to the home and found the victim with a large amount of blood on his face. When police asked Williams what happened to her husband, she first said that he fell and cut himself, but then told officers more. Williams said her common-law spouse went to a store to...

Momentum appears to be building for a breakthrough deal on Iran's nuclear program, with top diplomats flocking to the site of ongoing talks and one Western official saying Friday a deal could be reached "as soon as tonight." U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and British Foreign Secretary William Hague will both be in Geneva on Saturday.

Officials in a Tennessee city said a police officer was fired for shooting his gun and using pepper spray in an attempt to get a squirrel out of a dollar store. Mountain City Police Officer Jody Putnam went to a Dollar General in Johnson County on a report of a squirrel running loose in the store and police department records state the officer fired off his gun in an apparent attempt to kill or scare the animal, WJHL-TV, Johnson City, Tenn., reported Friday. "Shooting back there, of course that should not have been, that should not have happened," property owner...

I tried googling for some answers, but I think my question is too vague. I am the proud new dog owner of an adorable five-year-old female dachshund mix. I've worked with dogs for the last eight years in a medical setting, but have never had one of my own. Can I (or more to the point is it advisable to) bring my Lady with me on election day when I hand out sample ballots for my precinct? What kind of political activities are dog-friendly, and which should be avoided? Also, any recommendations for colorful doggie t-shirt/sweaters? Six in the morning...

Most people prefer not to look at the contents of their toilet, but a St. James woman had no choice when the contents of her toilet tried to escape. Angela Campbell said her dogs were acting strange early Wednesday morning. She started hearing loud noises coming from the toilet. "It basically sounded like a bowling ball flopping inside of a toilet. The things I was envisioning in my head were monsters," she said. When she went and opened the toilet, she discovered not monsters, but a squirrel clinging to the bowl and smelling extremely bad, she said. "It basically was...

A US ambassador in Syria was bloodily murdered on September 11, 2012. In the immediate aftermath, the Obama Administration knowingly put forward erroneous talking points and intelligence, likely in the hopes that their mishandling of terrorism would not hurt the President's reelection campaign. The IRS, starting as early as 2010, scrutinized and targeted Tea Party groups. The Administration dismissed these claims for three years; yet, as the Tea Party has been vindicated, President Obama is scrambling to save face, saying that only lower-level employees knew about this partisanship. Today, it was also revealed that the Obama Administration is secretly wiretapping...

Authorities in Gainesville, Fla. have charged William Daniel Lloyd with discharging a firearm in public and possession of ammunition by a convicted felon, after he reportedly tried to shoot a squirrel for dinner by taping a .40-caliber cartridge to the muzzle of a Pumpmaster 7670 BB gun. Lloyd, 31, was treated — and later released — for shrapnel wounds when the cartridge exploded. The condition of the targeted squirrel was not reported. The Gainesville Sun .

File this under the nascent category of "frightened rodents on YouTube." A certain clip from the nature documentary BBC's Africa, narrated by David Attenborough has caught the attention of internet meme-makers, and sure enough it's now making the rounds online. The 20 second snippet of footage takes place somewhere on the great continent, and what little context we have depicts a spotted cheetah on the hunt. "He's blown it," Attenborough says, as a succession of prey high-tails it out of the cheetahs hungry path. Last is our little friend the squirrel, who drops his own tasty lunch to head for...

I went out to my garden by the barn and heard splashing in the horse tank. I saw movement and ran to see what the heck was going on when an exhausted squirrel rose up and tried desperately to claw her way out of the metal tank. She couldn't and was swimming in circles. I grabbed a hoe and after a few failed attempts, got her out. I was afraid to touch her with my hands because of fleas and potential disease. She finally used her teeth to bite the edge of the hoe and I was able to lift...

Squirrels can be awfully aerobatic when they want to, and, in the case of one squirrel, those aerobatics led to some delicious bird food. Realizing that he couldn’t walk across a suspended bird feeder, this little crafty guy used the suspension line and his adorable paws to create a squirrel-based zipline. Either this squirrel really wanted to have some fun, or the bird feed in the suspended feeder is absolutely amazing. This video was uploaded to YouTube on December 28 and has racked up 3,882 views at the time of this post.

The balancing act between campaigning and dealing with a natural disaster the week before a presidential election is a vexing one, considering there's no precedent for it. In the latest example of juggling both, President Obama made a last-minute decision this morning to fly back to the White House and forgo the one campaign stop he kept on his schedule for today. After initially announcing that he would skip his Ohio stop later today but still attend a campaign event in Orlando, Fla., a key spot in an important battleground state, the president flew to Orlando Sunday night to be...

On paper, a president with Barack Obama’s record has no shot at re-election. The Democrats, knowing that Obama’s record is indefensible, decided that their only viable strategy is one of distraction. Every day, they have to come up with something to distract voters from Obama’s record. Michelle Malkin called it the Squirrel Strategy–”look, over there–a squirrel!” Today’s squirrel is a decades-old divorce in which Mitt Romney was deposed. **snip**Meanwhile, there is a great deal of real news if the press would choose to cover it. It was reported today that Iran has reached a milestone in its effort to produce...

Senator says nuts to SDSU 'RoboSquirrel' study - The 'Robosquirrel' developed by San Diego State and UC Davis can move its tail to mimic the behavior of a real animal. UC Davis A San Diego State University research project involving robotic squirrels has been placed on Sen. Tom Coburn's annual list of wasteful government spending, a move the campus says is unfair and misleading. Coburn, R-Okla., issued the list last week, criticizing everything from the use of food stamps to purchase fast food to a subsidy for a struggling ferry business in Alaska. The list also is critical of the...

Democrats need to change their party mascot from the donkey to the squirrel. They divert the media and the electorate’s short attention spans with fleeting, fuzzy objects — like the talking dog in the animated Pixar movie “Up,” who was easily distracted from his main thoughts and serious duties by every last little, moving trifle. Embassy attacks? Quick, find a squirrel! Warnings ignored? Squirrel! American troops killed by long-plotting jihadis exploiting security weaknesses? Squirrel! First Amendment sabotage by White House officials in the name of political correctness? Squirrel! Chronic joblessness, high gas prices, exploding dependency? Squirrel! Squirrel! Squirrel!

The week got off to an emotional start for police officers in a small German town after they poured energy - and olive oil - into freeing a squirrel with its head stuck in a manhole cover, only to find it had died of stress a couple of hours later.The pair of officers were called to the squirrel's aid on Monday when a woman found its little head, squealing manically, poking out of the road, the Hannoversche Allgemeine newspaper reported. Initially they tried to push the animal's head down through the hole but it was too tightly jammed in, and...

Mark Sapwell believes he has discovered an 'archaic version' of social networking site Facebook. Mark Sapwell, who is a PhD archaeology student at St John's College, believes he has discovered an "archaic version" of the social networking site, where users share thoughts and emotions and give stamps of approval to other contributions -- similar to the Facebook "like". Images of animals and events were drawn on the rock faces in Russian and Northern Sweden to communicate with distant tribes and descendants during the Bronze Age. They form a timeline preserved in stone encompassing thousands of years. Mr Sapwell said: "Like...

A baby squirrel is finding a home of sorts alongside a cat and her kittens in Michigan. Eight-year-old Bailee Schultz heard the squirrel whimpering a few weeks ago in a wooded area of his grandparents' property in Bay County's Bangor Township. Stephanie Box tells MLive.com (http://bit.ly/IX2Oqj ) Bailee brought her to the squirrel, which was under a nest. Box says she placed the squirrel they call Bushytail with her cat, Oreo, who recently gave birth to five kittens. The next day, Box says the squirrel was nursing side-by-side with the kittens. They've also seen Oreo lick Bushytail.

AUTHOR Eric C Bartholomew has photographed lots of animals – elephants, tigers, wild boar – but none were as tricky to capture as Thanet's albino squirrel. The 67-year-old scribbler, of St Lawrence Chase, Ramsgate, spotted the white wonder in a park close to Ramsgate's Royal Esplanade on Monday, April 16. Wildlife experts estimate that the odds of a pure white squirrel being born are one in 100,000. Mr Bartholomew, a safari lover, chased the rare rodent around the park for 20 minutes before he got his shot at about 7am. He said: "I was in the right place at the...

A Philadelphia man came to the rescue of a hungry squirrel that was apparently stuck inside a bag of pistachios. Sergei Petrov was hanging out at his friend’s house Thursday when he noticed the squirrel with the bag on its head, running in circles. “He sensed that I was there, but he couldn’t see me so he ran into a wall,” Petrov told ABCNews.com. After several attempts with his foot and finally his hand, Petrov freed the squirrel from the bag. Shocked, the little guy went sprinting in the other direction and up a tree, leaving Petrov happy he didn’t...

MOSCOW (AP) -- It was an Ice Age squirrel's treasure chamber, a burrow containing fruit and seeds that had been stuck in the Siberian permafrost for over 30,000 years. From the fruit tissues, a team of Russian scientists managed to resurrect an entire plant in a pioneering experiment that paves the way for the revival of other species. The Silene stenophylla is the oldest plant ever to be regenerated, the researchers said, and it is fertile, producing white flowers and viable seeds. The experiment proves that permafrost serves as a natural depository for ancient life forms, said the Russian researchers,...